Category Archives: Outside Awards

Awards and Publications, Current Students, Outside Awards

History of Art PhD candidate Shannon Steiner awarded 2-year Kress Foundation Fellowship

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Shannon Steiner received a two-year Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellowship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) in Munich, Germany, which will support her dissertation research on the subject of Byzantine cloisonné enamel.

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation is a premier source of grant and fellowship support for the study, preservation, and conservation of European art before the 19th century. The Kress Foundation partners with six European research centers for art history and offers one pre-doctoral fellowship per year for each.

The ZIKG in Munich is an internationally recognized research center for art history founded in 1946. It houses one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive art history libraries. The ZIKG especially supports object-based research with a focus on materials and techniques, art history as a specialized science, and art history in a global context.

The Institut is also home to the Forschungsstelle Realienkunde (Material Culture Research Center), which promotes research on the intersection of materials, technology, and representation. Shannon was particularly drawn to the triangulated research approach at the ZIKG because her dissertation frames Byzantine enamel as the visual manifestation of complex materials/chemical sciences and explores how the medium could embody and communicate ideas about the Byzantine Empire’s power over the natural world.

At the ZIKG, Shannon’s research will focus first on studying surviving Byzantine texts ranging from alchemical treatises to poetry to manuals on courtly protocol for mention of enamel, in order to glean information about its cultural significance and use. She will then undertake significant object-based study, including macrophotography of surviving Byzantine enameled objects in Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and The Republic of Georgia in order to document unique characteristics of their design, material composition and fabrication. Her ultimate goal is to bring these objects’ material characteristics into dialogue with textual evidence concerning enamel’s meaning in Byzantine society and diplomacy.

Conferences and Presentations, Outside Awards

Chemistry graduate students make impressive showing at American Chemical Society’s poster competition

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The Philadelphia Younger Chemists Committee (of the American Chemical Society) held its 15th annual student poster session at the University of the Sciences on March 31st. Two graduate students from Dean Burgmayer’s lab, Doug Gisewhite (M.A. 2014) and Ben Williams (PhD candidate), co-presented their work, “Molybdenum Pyranopterin Dithiolene Complexes: Synthetic Models for Pyran Cyclization in the Molybdenum Cofactor,” and tied for first place in the graduate student/post-doc division. Sarah Burke, a recent graduate of the PhD program in chemistry from Professor Bill Malachowski’s lab, was also in attendance and took third prize in the same division for her poster titled “Boronic Acid Analogs of Anti-HIV Therapies.” Burke is currently at the University of the Sciences working under Dr. John Tomsho.

Also participating in the evening’s festivities were Nissa Abidi (2nd-year graduate student) and other undergraduates from Professor Jason Schmink’s lab.

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Congratulations to all!

Current Students, Outside Awards, Report from the Field

Report from the Field: Katherine Rochester’s Animated Year in Germany

Photo by Constance Mensh

­­Before Pixar, before Looney Tunes, before Disney, there was Lotte Reiniger.

“Who?” you might ask and we wouldn’t blame you for the Weimar-era director and pioneer of animation has been all but forgotten, particularly in U.S. histories of film.

But, today, a Bryn Mawr doctoral student, Katherine Rochester M.A. ’12 is aiming to write Reiniger back into the history books.

Born in Berlin in 1899, Reiniger was the first woman—the first person­­—to direct a feature-length animated film. Called Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), this long-neglected masterpiece knit together stories from the classic One Thousand and One Nights. A critical and popular success in its day, the film employs a silhouette animation technique reminiscent of wayang shadow puppetry.

Rochester

Rochester is spending the academic year as a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Using Berlin as a launching pad, she is visiting museums and archives throughout Germany to conduct research for her dissertation, which focuses on experimental animation and the conventions of its display.

Recently, she reported back from Tübingen, where she happily sifted through a treasure trove of artist Reiniger’s exquisite work. Next up: visits to the silhouette museum in Vreden and the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf.

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A fourth-year Ph.D. candidate, Katherine has worked as a curatorial internship for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2012 Whitney Biennial and as the curatorial assistant for the exhibition Jason Rhoades, Four Roads, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In addition, she has written for Art in America, Artforum, and other publications.

Archive spread

Photo credits: Katherine Rochester, Stadtmuseum Tübingen.

Current Students, Outside Awards, Report from the Field

Report from the Field: Alex Bray Hunts Medieval Images in Jordan

Alex Bray (Ph.D. candidate, History of Art) is spending the academic year in Jordan. He has just completed a CAORC ACOR Pre-doctoral fellowship, and has now begun the SSRC IDRF-funded portion of his research travel. Thus far, Alex has been able to visit a number of sites and museums related to his research on images of hunting produced within the Umayyad empire, and to discuss his research with scholars who have excavated at some of these sites. Recently, he has been visiting the excavated ruins of early medieval churches and domestic complexes throughout the region in order to see and photograph related mosaics of predation and hunting.

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Alex is currently focusing on an excavation of a late seventh- or early eighth-century bathhouse associated with an estate known as Qastal, only a few kilometers west of the Queen Alia international airport. The bathhouse was excavated a little over a decade ago, but a significant portion of the structure was paved over before it was discovered by archaeologists. Although they were only able to uncover about a fifth of the building’s foundations and floors, this was enough to make it clear that the bathhouse resembles those at two other Umayyad sites in Jordan, known as Ḥammām al-Ṣarāḥ and Quṣayr ʿAmra. In addition to researching the significance of the impressive mosaics of predation that were discovered in the bathhouse, Ales is attempting to situate them within an architectural context based on these more complete monuments.

Using plans of Quṣayr ʿAmra and the excavations at Qastal, he has created a digital model of the building that probably once existed at Qastal (seen above). To clarify that this is only a hypothetical reconstruction, he has used image editing software to render his model in a watercolor finish, rather than risk creating a misleading photorealistic rendering.

Awards and Publications, Current Students, Outside Awards

Whiting Fellowship Winners: Johanna Best (Archaeology) and Maeve Doyle (History of Art)

This year’s Whiting Fellows in the Humanities are Maeve Doyle (History of Art) and Johanna Best (Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology).  The Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and History of Art celebrated the recipients at its annual Whiting Fellows Presentation, October 21, 2014. The Fellows presented on their dissertation research and answered questions from a lively audience.